Complementary Strengths: Western Psychology and Traditional Healing

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:00 -0500

Complementary Strengths: Western Psychology and Traditional Healing

by Lucrecia Wamb

Download full notebook below.

In this notebook, we learn about efforts to integrate and maximize knowledge from traditional and western healing methods to reintegrate child soldiers into communities devastated by war. Rebuilding Hope saw the need for an integrated healing process that would allow families and communities to accept child soldiers back into their lives -- even those who had killed their relatives and burned down villages. Acknowledging that traditional healers are often the first people community members approach when they need help (healing), Rebuilding Hope psychologists approached the healers as well as other community leaders, such as teachers and tribal leaders, to be project partners. The creation of an integrated support system combining western psychology and the traditional healing processes enabled children to be reintegrated into their families and communities as purified people, while the psychologists developed sustainable mental and emotional support systems for them. Such reintegration issues are not unique to Mozambique. Other communities dealing with these complex issues of reintegration, whether of child solders or other populations, can find this tactic helpful in generating ideas toward accessing traditional forms of support and healing.

Mental health practices and interventions in developing countries and post-conflict situations are extremely challenging. A common misperception is that mental health support is the sole task of psychologists, social workers, medical doctors, counselors, and nurses–in other words, western-trained personnel. Our experience, however, shows how a community process of mental health assistance must constructively involve all levels of experience and knowledge in the society. In this tactical notebook, we will describe the reintegration of former child soldiers back into their communities, a process that brought about the collaboration of community leaders, Western-trained psychologists, and local curandieros (healers). All societies and cultures have developed, created, and learned mechanisms to deal with their specific problems in different spheres of life. If we seek to help a community to rebuild itself from trauma, our approach should first ask "how is this society or community already using its own resources to overcome or deal with the problem?"

To illustrate this, I will share with you the experience of a Mozambican nongovernmental organization, Reconstruindo a Esperança (RE, Rebuilding Hope) in working with children affected by military violence, particularly in rural communities. The work focused on providing psychological assistance and promoting community reintegration after 16 years of war, in the process using and reinforcing community resources. In this notebook we focus on Josina Machel Island, a rural community in Maputo province, 130 km from the city of Maputo. The island has 10,000 inhabitants, the majority of whom make a living from agriculture, fishing, livestock, and migratory labor (working in the Republic of South Africa). During the war an important military base was nearby. Many children were used as combatants, and many were sexually exploited.

Collective traumas, like war, are more than the sum of their individual effects. These traumas rip apart the social fabric, damaging the very foundations of social relations upon which mental health depends. Conventional psychotraumatology tends to focus on the individual’s experience, but in order to help individuals heal as community members who have lived a collective trauma, something more is needed. The process must involve the community and its indigenous social and spiritual support mechanisms. People define their identity in relation to their community and ancestors, and after trauma they must rebuild that identity with the community. In the cosmology of that community process, individualized Western psychology alone will not suffice. Rebuilding Hope created a uniquely collaborative process, based on mutual respect for both western and traditional disciplines of healing.

The process we built was as inclusive as possible, facilitating the empowerment of the community as a whole while still caring for the individual psychological needs of our clients. The project encouraged and depended upon the leadership and support of community religious leaders, local teachers, and parents. With the help of traditional local and religious leaders, we forged links with local curandieros. As a result of this collaboration, when those under our psychotherapeutic care felt they needed traditional purification rituals to wash away the bad spirits, we referred them to the curandeiros. Reciprocally, the traditional healers would purify their patients and send them to the psychologists for additional support. As a result, an integrated support system was created: through traditional healing processes, children were reintegrated into their families and communities as purified people, while the psychologists developed sustainability methods for mental and emotional well-being. The result was a symbiotic model of psychotherapeutic interventions, taking into account the local knowledge and culture.

During a period of eight years, Rebuilding Hope has worked with approximately 700 children. The lessons we can learn from this go beyond the reintegration of child soldiers. It is our hope that our experience will help people working in other contexts to effectively integrate into their approaches the local capacities, cultural concepts, and wisdom, catalytic tools that can be essential in rebuilding community mental health. The need for such cross-cultural integration of healing strategies will certainly be relevant elsewhere, not only in the African context–i.e. Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Rwanda, and Ivory Coast–but in other countries as well.

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